Saboteurs
Rain was pouring down as the saboteurs clambered aboard a boat, making Berlin seem even grayer and bleaker than usual.24 The first lock they inspected had wooden doors on large metal hinges, which opened to permit water levels to rise and fall. The best way to destroy such a lock, Barth instructed, was to apply a couple of sticks of dynamite to the hinge, the weakest point in the lock. Once one or two locks had been destroyed, the force of tumbling water would usually be sufficient to rip out all the locks lower down in the system.
Next, they inspected a more modern type of lock that rose up and down with a pulley-and-cable mechanism. Barth recommended putting this kind of lock out of action by disabling the machinery that pulled the doors up and down. Another method of putting a canal out of action was to sink a concrete-laden barge in the middle of the stream.
The next day, Barth took the saboteurs to see a railroad repair shop. They were introduced as counterintelligence agents, studying how to combat sabotage by Russian partisans.25 The chief engineer seemed satisfied with this explanation. He took them through the shop, pointing out the kind of targets that might interest a saboteur and describing the workings of a steam engine.
After lunch, they walked to a nearby railroad yard. At Quenz Lake, Barth had already given the men a detailed explanation of American rolling stock, identifying the weak points on different types of equipment. Climbing on top of a locomotive, he pointed out a simple way of disabling the engine by putting sand in the cylinders or in the oil boxes, a method favored by Russian saboteurs.
A more sophisticated way of achieving the same result, Barth explained back in the Kaukasus office, was to use the exploding coal designed by Abwehr specialists, which was armed by a detonating cap. Several lumps of such coal thrown into the tender of a locomotive would eventually make their way into the furnace, causing the train to “go high up in the air.”26
THE HIGHLIGHT of the inspection tour was a two-day trip to the aluminum and magnesium plants of the IG Farben group. In addition to the nine saboteurs, half a dozen officials went along for the trip, including Kappe, a representative of the Army High Command, a man from Farben headquarters, and the two Herr Doktors from the sabotage school. They left Berlin by train at six o’clock on Thursday morning, arriving in Bitterfeld three hours later. From the rail station, a bus took them to the aluminum plant, the biggest in Germany.
The group listened to a lecture on the aluminum manufacturing process, with frequent reminders on the importance of destroying the power supply. Then they inspected the plant, whose layout was very similar to facilities run by the Aluminum Company of America, the company that dominated aluminum production throughout the United States. Some of the Farben engineers were able to talk very knowledgeably about the challenges facing the saboteurs as they had been to the Alcoa factories before the war.
First stop on the tour were the electric baths where molten ores were turned into aluminum. They moved on to the main powerhouse to inspect the transformers that reduced the incoming power voltage from a hundred thousand volts to the much lower level necessary to feed the electrolysis machines. Farben officials showed them how to destroy the transformers by placing explosives next to the air-cooling system, which would cause the oil to drain out of the cooler. An alternative method was to shoot a high-velocity bullet between the metal ribs of the cooling system.
Nearby, the engineers pointed out some tall porcelain insulators; a hammer blow to one of these insulators would destroy the vacuum and knock out the power supply. In order to gain access to the porcelain jars, they would probably need to “immobilize” the man in the control room.
Security at the sprawling aluminum plant was hardly perfect, the saboteurs observed with satisfaction.27 Burger and Dasch noted numerous ways of gaining access. The director told them that as an experiment he had instructed his guards to try to smuggle dummy packages of explosives into the plant. Out of twenty-seven men selected for the exercise, twenty-six managed to complete their mission without being caught. In order to strengthen security, the director had appointed guards with shotguns to patrol the exterior and interior of the plant. With his military training, Burger quickly spotted at least one of the guards walking around with an unloaded shotgun over his shoulder, a detail he delighted in pointing out to the director.
Their work completed, the saboteurs and their hosts retired to the company dining room for a feast complete with cigars and bottles of wine. It impressed Dasch as “the swellest dinner I ever had in Germany . . . We were treated like kings!”28 They spent Thursday night in Bitterfeld, traveling on to Dessau the following morning.
From Dessau, a bus took the party to the brand-new aluminum and magnesium plants at Aachen, which were still being completed. They made the usual inspection tour, but what most struck Dasch and some of the other saboteurs was the system of forced labor recently introduced by Hitler. Ninety percent of the workers at the two plants had been shipped in from conquered areas of the Soviet Union. Many appeared to be starving. Over another lavish lunch, the director explained that these “free” workers—as opposed to prisoners of war—earned around thirty-five marks a week. Out of this amount, they had to pay around thirty marks for food and lodging. In order to buy luxuries, such as beer and cigarettes, they needed special coupons, which were only handed out to the most deserving.
The Russians, Dasch noted, were escorted to and from the camp by armed guard. Even though the weather had turned fairly warm, they came to work dressed in winter clothes, including scraps of old furs. “They wear everything they possess,” one of the German managers explained. “They go to bed with those clothes on and they come to work with them on.” 29 He seemed unconcerned that the workers had a tendency to “drop down, just like flies.”
The men returned to Berlin by train that night, arriving at two in the morning. Kappe gave them the rest of the weekend off, telling them to report back on Monday. It had been an exhausting but instructive week.
BEGINNING ON May 18, Kappe called in the men individually to the Rankestrasse bunker to go over final arrangements for their trip. He wanted to make sure that their service papers were all in order before they left for America. Nobody knew what would happen to Kappe and the other Abwehr officers who had ordered the sabotage mission—any of them might be sent to the Russian front at any moment—so it was best to put everything in writing.
Kappe handed each saboteur three documents.30 The first was a financial contract, stipulating the man’s salary and how much his family would receive in the event of his death. It stipulated that the saboteurs would report to the Vertrauensmänner Abteilung, the Trusted Agents’ section of the Abwehr. The second document committed the Abwehr to find an appropriate civilian job for the V-man—as agents were known—once the war was over. The third was a pledge of secrecy, obliging the V-man never to talk about his work to outsiders on penalty of death.
The salary scale depended on the individual saboteur. As group leaders, Dasch and Kerling would receive 600 marks a month. Most of the others would earn from 250 to 500 marks, similar to what they had been making as civilians. The two soldiers, Neubauer and Burger, would continue to receive their regular army pay. Neubauer objected to this arrangement and, after some argument, persuaded Kappe to increase his salary. Burger merely asked for the inclusion of a clause promising him complete rehabilitation in the eyes of the Nazi Party if he carried out his mission successfully.31 The papers had been countersigned in advance by senior Abwehr officers. As Kappe produced each document for signature, he carefully covered up the names of the Abwehr officials. One by one, each V-man signed his name on the dotted line.
From now on, the saboteurs were not permitted to communicate with their families. In order to reassure family members, Kappe made a list of their birthdays. He planned to send each relative birthday greetings from the saboteur announcing that he was alive and well and serving the Fatherland in an undisclosed location.32 If the relatives wanted to reach the saboteur, they could write to Kappe c/o Der
Kaukasus.
Next, Kappe made sure his agents were properly clothed for their journey to America. He had been able to scrounge some civilian clothing from a tightly guarded, two-story warehouse on the outskirts of Berlin that contained an array of used clothes, all neatly sorted. Suits and overcoats were on the first floor; hats, underwear, and luggage on the second; shoes down in the cellar. Many of the clothes had foreign labels, from places like Sweden, Czechoslovakia, France, and even America. When Dasch visited the building to help Schmidt pick out a faded blue double-breasted suit and bright yellow shoes, he guessed that the clothes had previously belonged to Jews sent to concentration camps.33
Some of the men, including Dasch, still had American outfits they had brought back with them to Germany. Kappe told them to make a list of all their belongings so they could wear each other’s clothes.34 Dasch ended up giving away a pair of black shoes, some shirts, and underwear to the other men.
Kappe did not want his agents to wear their civilian clothes when they landed in America. If they were captured, they might be executed as spies. So he took them to a navy warehouse to fit them out in military fatigues, consisting of khaki pants and jacket, wool socks, black boots, and a cap decorated with the swastika. Although none of the uniforms carried any sign of rank or other insignia, Kappe assumed they would be sufficient to identify the men as German soldiers, to be treated as prisoners of war if captured.
Abwehr experts made sure that the V-men had sufficient documentation to support their cover stories in America. They provided them with false ID papers, Social Security cards, and draft registration cards. In Burger’s case, they cleaned up his U.S. naturalization certificate, which showed he had been issued a passport in 1933 to return to Germany. Kappe took the certificate away, returning it a few days later with the incriminating rubber stamp removed.35
In the meantime, eight wooden crates containing explosives, detonators, and fuses were delivered to the Kaukasus office.36 The boxes—eleven inches wide, eight and a half inches tall, and twenty-one inches long— were all expertly packed. An inner container of galvanized steel made the contents completely waterproof. Six of the boxes, identified with a large X, held yellow blocks of TNT and pieces of exploding coal of the kind the saboteurs had used for training sessions at Quenz Lake. The two other boxes contained various types of detonator, fourteen-day timers, and several dozen “American fountain pen” sets in small leather cases. Each pen concealed an ingenious delay mechanism for setting off explosives: a capsule of sulfuric acid that, once released, would slowly eat its way through a piece of celluloid and ignite a charge of potassium chlorate.
The two group leaders, Dasch and Kerling, needed to settle on a rendezvous point and a system for getting in touch with each other if all else failed. For the meeting place, Kappe suggested Cincinnati. Both group leaders knew the city well, and it was conveniently located between Dasch’s area of operations in the Midwest and Kerling’s in New York State and Pennsylvania. Kappe wanted to give both groups enough time to get across the Atlantic and find their way around America. For the date of their reunion, he proposed July 4, which was both easy to remember and had a patriotic ring to it, appealing to Kappe’s none-too-subtle sense of humor.
Dasch and Kerling agreed to meet at the grill of the Hotel Gibson in Cincinnati at lunchtime or, as a backup, dinner.37 If the first rendezvous failed, they would return to the hotel on subsequent Sundays until they either met up or decided their partner was in trouble. The instructions were to sit in different parts of the restaurant, giving no sign that they recognized each other. Once they were sure nobody was watching them, one of them would leave, and the other would follow.
During their last two days in Berlin, Dasch and Kerling returned to the Abwehr laboratory for a final round of instructions in secret writing. A female technician presented the two men with a packet of three matches impregnated with invisible ink, and watched them practice writing. “You pressed too hard,” she scolded Dasch. “Do it again.” 38
After showing the two men how to apply just a light amount of pressure with the matchstick, she took them next door to a dark room, and placed the paper under a machine that produced ultraviolet light. Within about ten seconds, the secret writing appeared.
The two group leaders also used secret ink to exchange addresses of friends and trusted family members to contact in an emergency. Dipping a toothpick in a solution made out of pyrimidine—the basic ingredient for laxatives—Dasch copied names and addresses provided by Kerling and Kappe onto a white handkerchief:39
Maria Da Conceicao Lopez, Lisboa, Rua Ecorias 52. Father Krepper, c/o Gene Frey, R.F.D. 2, Box 40, Rahway. Bingo: Walter Froehling, 3643 Whipple, Chi. Helmut Leiner, 2158 39th Street, Astoria. FRANZ DANIEL PASTORIUS.
Lopez was the cutout in Portugal, to be used for communications with Kappe. Father Krepper was a pro-Nazi Lutheran priest in New Jersey, who could help out with false birth certificates and identification papers. Bingo was Haupt’s Abwehr code name; Froehling, the name of his uncle in Chicago, who might be able to help Dasch’s group find a farm to use as a hideout for their sabotage materials. Leiner was Kerling’s best friend in New York, a thoroughly reliable Nazi. Pastorius was the name of the mission, and also the code word by which the saboteurs would announce themselves to other V-men. In order to make a connection, both parts of the name had to click.
They had practiced the drill many times, both at Quenz Lake and in Berlin:
“Greetings from Franz Daniel.”
“Pastorius.”40
BERLIN IN the spring of 1942 was a depressing city, relieved only by a grim determination to enjoy life’s few remaining pleasures. Hopes of a quick victory over the Red Army had faded and rumors were beginning to circulate of huge numbers of casualties on the eastern front. The Wehrmacht no longer seemed invincible, despite Hitler’s pledge on the nation’s Memorial Day to destroy “the Bolshevist hordes” by the end of the summer. 41 The city itself was now almost completely “Aryanized,” most of the Jews having been deported to the East. The few that remained had to wear a yellow star on the outside of their clothes to distinguish them from Aryans. Their ration cards were stamped with purple Js, a sign for shopkeepers to serve them last.
On the surface, life seemed normal enough. Despite some bombing by the Royal Air Force the previous year, the city was reasonably intact, with little obvious damage. Some monuments, including the Victory Column in the Tiergarten, were disguised by camouflage netting. Newspaper kiosks trumpeted the latest successes of German U-boats in the Atlantic and “enormous losses” inflicted on the Soviets in Russia. There were fewer people in the streets, and not nearly as much traffic as before the war, but the zoo was crowded with families and off-duty soldiers. As in prewar years, Berliners indulged their love for asparagus, a springtime delicacy, with daily newspaper reports on the market price.
It was, however, a distinctly threadbare normality. The shop windows along the Kurfürstendamm were still full of shoes, dresses, and suits, suggesting at least a hint of prewar plenty, but when a customer tried to buy what was advertised in the window, the items were usually unavailable. 42 When goods did appear, long lines formed immediately.
The one exception to this economy of scarcity was the entertainment business. In the absence of any other outlet for spending their reichsmarks, off-duty soldiers and Nazi officials alike flocked to the city’s concert halls, nightclubs, beer halls, movie houses, and prostitution dens, most of which had remained open. In mid-May, Berlin newspapers listed twenty-six functioning theaters, four cabarets, and sixty-eight movie houses, most of them showing escapist romances like Dance with the Kaiser, starring Marika Rokk, the sweetheart of the Third Reich.
There seemed little point in saving money. Even if one stayed alive, the marks would probably soon be worthless. During their last week in Berlin, the saboteurs became avid connoisseurs of the city’s nightlife, quickly using up the spending money distributed by Kappe. To Dasch, who had worked half his life
in American restaurants, the food he ate in Berlin “filled you up for a moment but in an hour or so you were hungry like a dog.” 43 The beer had “lost all its strength” and tasted as if there were “hardly any malts or hops in it.” But the restaurants and clip joints were still “jammed to the gills.”
The nightclubs offered a window into the political structure of the Third Reich. Rivalry between the army and the S.S. was so intense that soldiers and S.S. men usually patronized different clubs. When they mixed, there was often trouble. One evening, Burger wandered into a club frequented by Luftwaffe officers, several of whom wore the Knights Cross around their collars, indicating that they had shot down at least forty enemy planes. One of the officers asked the bandleader to play an American tango.44 As the band struck up the music, a man in civilian clothes jumped up from his seat near the back of the club, walked over to the conductor, and flashed a Gestapo badge. American songs were verboten.The conductor pointed in the direction of the war hero, who got up to talk to the Gestapo man. Within a few seconds, the Gestapo man was escorted to the door by the Luftwaffe officers, who announced they had evicted “a Gestapo rat.” The officers received a standing ovation, and the band played on.
On their next-to-last night in Berlin, the V-men were invited to a farewell dinner at the city’s celebrated Zoo restaurant. Kappe told them that “the big chief” himself would be present, leading to some speculation that the Führer might put in an appearance. The banquet took place in a private dining room. The “big chief” turned out to be a tall man in a well-cut civilian suit who was greeted with a flurry of Heil Hitler salutes when he walked into the room. He was introduced only as “Dr. Schmidt,” but some of the Abwehr officers addressed him as “Herr Oberst,” Herr Colonel.45 The V-men eventually figured out that “Dr. Schmidt” was in reality Colonel Erwin von Lahousen.